‘After a year of human tragedy and extensive economic hardship, it is encouraging to see that the people responsible for making investment decisions and hiring staff are feeling cautiously optimistic about the year ahead. CEOs have faith that growth will return, boosted by the rapid development of vaccines and their rollout in many parts of the world’, said Bob Moritz, Chairman of the PwC Network.
The percentage of CEOs expressing concerns about climate change has risen from 24 percent in 2020 to 30 percent in 2021. Climate change still only ranks ninth among CEOs’ perceived threats to growth. Meanwhile, 39 percent of the CEOs polled believe their organisation needs to do more to ‘measure’ their environmental impact. And 43 percent believe their organisation needs to do more to ‘report’ on it, a greater share than any other disclosure area.
Also rising rapidly up the list of CEO concerns is the spread of misinformation (28 percent, up from 16 percent in 2020). Most CEOs planned to boost their spending on cybersecurity and data privacy by 10% or more.